Way to go Wal-Mart!

This article came from a Yahoo! headline. It just makes me want to shop at Wal-Mart even more!

In other disturbing albeit not life-and-death news, Green Day battled with Wal-Mart this week, when the retail behemoth refused to sell the punk-pop trio's latest album, 21st Century Breakdown. Wal-Mart wanted the album edited for language and content, but Green Day refused to offer the chain a "clean version" for sale, so Wal-Mart opted not to stock it at all.

"Wal-Mart's become the biggest retail outlet in the country, but they won't carry our record because they wanted us to censor it," frontman Billie Joe Armstrong griped to the press. "They want artists to censor their records in order to be carried in there. We just said no. We've never done it before. You feel like you're in 1953 or something."

Billie Joe continued: "If you think about bands that are struggling or smaller than Green Day...to think that to get your record out in places like that, but they won't carry it because of the content and you have to censor yourself. I mean, what does that say to a young kid who's trying to speak his mind making a record for the first time? It's like a game that you have to play. You have to refuse to play it." Added bassist Mike Dirnt, more succinctly but just as effectively: "As the biggest record store in the America, [Wal-Mart] should probably have an obligation to sell people the correct art."

Whatever Green Day. It's not like Wal-Mart is the government trying to run our lives with censorship. They are a private company and have every right and freedom to sell the things they want to sell. That is the beauty of private companies. I think it's great that Wal-Mart wouldn't sell their original album.